Storm over Covid report on minorities
HEALTH officials were criticised yesterday for failing to publish a coronavirus report detailing measures to protect ethnic minorities.
Public Health England released a major review of virus cases last week which found that certain minorities were twice as likely to die from Covid-19. However, the organisation is yet to publish a second report containing recommendations to protect these communities, including in the workplace.
PHE insists the document will be released next week – but academics who helped to draw it up fear it has been suppressed.
Raj Bhopal, an emeritus professor of public health at the University of Edinburgh who looked at a late draft of the report, claimed Parliament ‘had not been told the full truth’. The second document’s existence is an ‘open secret amongst academics’, he told the BBC, adding that the report is ‘ready to go to press’.
He said: ‘The public has expressed a great deal of disappointment as well as the people who were part of this consultation, asking: “Where have our voices gone?”
‘Public trust saves lives. If you consult the public, you must publish the results. Otherwise, you’ve wasted their time, you’ve wasted your own time, you’ve wasted taxpayers’ money, and you’ve lost trust.’
A PHE spokesman said: ‘We intend to both formally submit this work to the [equalities minister] next week and will publish it at the same time.’
The row came as the BBC’s director of news said the broadcaster accepts ‘there is a lot of racism’ in Britain. In an online event for the Royal Television Society, Fran Unsworth confirmed it was ‘an agreed ground’ at the BBC, adding: ‘Whilst there might be some people who say that Britain and its institutions aren’t racist, actually the weight of opinion on that is that actually there is a lot of racism in Britain. And the BBC does accept that. It’s where you start to debate the consequences of it, the issues that surround it.... what you do about it? That requires impartiality in how you treat it.’ The £340,000-a-year executive stressed: ‘The BBC is not neutral about this story. It’s not impartial about racism.’
Of the Black Lives Matter protests, she said: ‘[The BBC] can endorse the sentiments behind it but it didn’t endorse it as a campaign. And actually our reporting... made it quite clear that actually it had ended in London with some violence.’